Higher Education and the American Dream. Are they Coming to a University Near You?

Marvin Lazerson, will present his latest book Higher Education and the American Dream: Success and its Discontents. The book shows how and why U.S. higher education, the most successful higher education system in the world, has also produced enormous discontents and disappointments, in other words how the U.S. higher education became the victim of its own success.

Marvin Lazerson is professor of higher education policy in the Department of Public Policy, Central European University and professor emeritus, University of Pennsylvania. He is a widely published scholar in the areas of educational history, higher education, and social policy. A member of the National Academy of Education (U.S.), he is past president of the History of Education Society. He has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia, as well as at Penn, where he also served as dean of the Graduate School of Education and the university's interim provost. His recent books include: The Education Gospel: the Economic Power of Schooling (Harvard University Press, 2004); Institutions of American Democracy: the Public Schools (Oxford University Press, 2005); and Higher Education and the American Dream: Success and its Discontents (Central European University Press, 2010).